These are just some of the benefits of expanding your planning process.

Pro-Tip: Planning can be collaborative, yet project collaboration doesn’t just happen organically. You have to embed collaboration at every phase of project management to truly yield the best plans with your team.

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Transcription:

Today, we’re talking about how to plan your project with your team. And the keyword here being “with.”

Why would we want to do that? Well we are looking for more of a collaboration between our team members. I mean, think about it. People process and learn information differently.

So when you’re planning your project there’s some team members who take things in spatially, meaning visually. Some people take things in linguistically by verbalizing or talking things through. Some are kinesthetics, so they want to touch things.

They actually want to get involved. And then we have the auditory by those who learn and process information by hearing it.

So by using all of these methods to plan just brings more collaboration into the entire planning effort. And so some of the byproducts we get is when people are involved and engaged then there’s more buy-in.

And with more buy-in comes more synergy, more ideas, you get greater insights from all the team members and more input. You are also are able to leverage the different team members strength.

And when you start doing this, you begin to talk more realistic about the project and talk about and identify some of the traps you may encounter.

So here are three scenarios that we want to look at that actually provides some traps that project managers can get into that we want to avoid.

So the first one is, we want to save time up front by doing the planning session together instead of building that perfect plan and presenting it to the team, the perfect one that doesn’t work because that ends up creating more rework. You have to go back and redo the plan. That’s rework costing you time, money, and effort.

Number two, get everyone involved so they feel like they are part of the process and actually buy-in instead of you building the plan in isolation and then presenting the plan.

Again, the lack of buy-in costs because they feel like they’re not involved and they feel like the work is being directed and given to them more as instructions.

Number three is add the task level to the Gantt chart so they can give realistic estimates to the work that they do instead of you guessing and creating more rework to rework those estimates. Because poor estimates can cause you to either overrun or under-run your budget.

So these are some of the reasons why and some of the benefits of working together. And if you need a tool that can help you plan with your team, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager.com.